She was much older; she looked tired and wasted.
“Well,” I said, “I waited at Havre.”
She stared; then she recognized me. She smiled and blushed and clasped her two hands together. “I remember you now,” she said. “I remember that day.” But she stood there, neither coming out nor asking me to come in. She was embarrassed.
I, too, felt a little awkward. I poked my stick into the path. “I kept looking out for you, year after year,” I said.
“You mean in Europe?” murmured Miss Spencer.
“In Europe, of course! Here, apparently, you are easy enough to find.”
She leaned her hand against the unpainted doorpost, and her head fell a little to one side. She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and I thought I recognized the expression that one sees in women’s eyes when tears are rising. Suddenly she stepped out upon the cracked slab of stone before the threshold and closed the door behind her. Then she began to smile intently, and I saw that her teeth were as pretty as ever. But there had been tears too.
“Have you been there ever since?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
“Until three weeks ago. And you—you never came back?”
Still looking at me with her fixed smile, she put her hand behind her and opened the door again. “I am not very polite,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”